This is turning into a blog about my real life and less about gaming. A big reason for that is I’m not really doing much in the way of gaming and the other big reason is I don’t find myself with a lot of free time to actually right up my usual drivel.

Work is good. Fixing issues, learning more of the inner workings of what is there, putting together solutions for existing problems focused on reliability, stability and ease of maintenance. Putting in a little extra time to start, but still ending the day feeling like my brain is going to explode.

Family is good. Giving the LBO and LLO some more responsibility in the morning and curbing their bad habit of removing their socks and launching them around whatever room they happen to be in at the time. They’re mostly playing Roblox at the moment – the upload issue is solved but they’re still consuming a lot of download now. Definitely seems to be Roblox since I blocked YouTube from the two PCs they use. Also the metrics show that the one day they didn’t touch the computer the bandwidth usage made sense.

Saturday night I was on my own after supper (took TheWife to The Works – gourmet burgers) then she went out with some friends. The kids were sleeping over at their friends’ place. I watched Cowboys and Aliens which was okay. I then went to bed at 9:30pm. How sad is that? That’s about the norm for me now. I try to stay up and watch something at 10 or start watching an hour long show at 9 and fall asleep soon after.

At least the bags under my eyes are gone. Before the bags had their own luggage.

Gaming is mostly dead. I get a little in weekend mornings, maybe in the afternoon but almost nothing at night. I cancelled SWTOR (though I still have access to it for another 24 days) simply because I haven’t had time to play it for three weeks and I really don’t have motivation to play knowing the end game is what it is (which is summed up nicely here). That leaves me fiddling with Skyrim (I mean to do the Rogue, Assassin and Stormcloak quest lines), Reckoning (much more action focused than Skyrim, but also less free-roaming with variant paths) and popping into StarCraft2 here and there just to watch some carnage. It sounds like a lot, but Skyrim lasts maybe an hour if I’m lucky and StarCraft2 is usually a half hour – one quick match. Reckoning tends to be what I play when I can string a couple of hours together.

Into Week Two with the new job. The last week was a bit of a blur but things are coming together now and I’m cluing into how they do things while building up other areas.

Keeps me busy.

Real busy.

I used to laugh at the kids crashing on the couch during the first week of a new school year, now I’m reminded how it feels.

I’ll still laugh at them though – it’s a benefit to being a dad.

Not much going on for blogging, maybe I’ll get back to a more regular pace once things settle down and I don’t feel so brain dead after work.

I picked up Reckoning (yesterday-ish), playing it on a new laptop I got (i7, SSD, HD, 3gb nVidia, 16gb RAM – it screams) and it’s running cleanly. Also tried Skyrim on there with the new high-res texture – loved it. Loaded up SWTOR on there too and hopped in for a few minutes to run around and see how it perform. All smooth.

I need to sort out the mic on the laptop – lots of feedback. It has a video camera as well so I should probably install Skype and use it for chatting with family on the other side of the country.

I’ll likely be bouncing between what ever games the kids want to play with me, Reckoning and SWTOR.

Tim says I’m “locusting”; I have to agree. If Diablo 3 was out I’d be playing that and Guild Wars 2 too.

That’s about all I have for random thoughts.

Happy Valentine’s Day.(Remember Steak and Blowjob day is only a month away!)

The environment is nice and friendly. It’s a private company and has a small family feel to it. Despite being small, the test team is larger than the one where I just left (which was shrinking year over year). They went through a hiring boom and need to relocate to make room for more people – always a good sign. Funny story, there were no less than two indirect personal connections, four indirect professional connections and one direct professional connection in that office.

The direct professional connection and I had some coffee and talked a little. For some reason I thought he was at the last place I worked less than six months ago but it had been well over a year since he was working at the new place. I chalk it up to the hectic nature of the previous job. He assured me it’s a lot less fast paced where I am now so I’m looking forward to that.

The first product I’m looking at seems solid, up to date GUI (which is going to be hell to automate) with a lot of automation behind the scenes. Having taken a course on it today, I can see why there is a lot of behind the scenes automation (not exactly API, but close) – a lot of the GUI is used to generate code behind the scenes so I’m guessing they’re writing direct code to trigger actions, collect results and verify expectations. Still learning that product.

Last day of work for me at the current company – there isn’t really much for me to do here short of collect personal belongings and data, then hand over hardware that belongs to the company. So yeah, I’m posting to my blog.

I’m planning on making some changes over the next little while, re-evaluating where online gaming fits in my life. Some of it might be burn out from WoW and the similarities between WoW and TOR end game and some of it just makes sense. Part of me wonders if all the online gaming stuff was just to fill a void that my work life wasn’t filling. It was somewhat stagnant with little opportunity to learn and apply new skills where as some of the games I was playing online frequently changed, there was a lot to learn and adjust to so maybe that was filling that need. I miss that and maybe I ended up spending a lot of that time and energy on the wrong things if I simply continue to play into the late hours of the night.

I’m not sure, I’m going to think about it.

I do know my new job is going to consume a fair bit of my time as I’ll be learning new systems, processes, product, specific (ISO) standard and technologies – which I love to do, but it will take time and I’ll need to focus. I likely won’t post nearly as often but I will post.

I’m pretty sure I’ll play games still, just not sure what.

(Yes, I’ll still be playing SWTOR here and there, I’m just not going to chase raiding or commit to a guild – there is no point)

I know, you’re thinking this is crazy that you should be able to play Diablo 3 without being connected to Battle.net or being online but you can’t. You log in to Battle.net much like you do for StarCraft2 and then you play off it… I think. If not, then the local server stuff has some lag issues which is weird.

There are three Game Privacy Modes. First is private, invite only. Second is Real ID friends can join. Third is public – anyone can join.

I haven’t figured out if that means you’re hosting a local server when you’re playing (except joining a public server because then you’re clearly not hosting… derp). I suspect as much.

Yesterday when I was playing as a Demon Hunter and Wizard I was facing some pretty bad lag – it was later in the day. Like the client was hiccuping; spells would run the animation then a second later the actual tracking effect would appear, then it’d warp back and appear again. Mobs (that didn’t have the teleport ability) would warp around like the client was out of synch.

At one point I was running around firing abilities off and nothing was happening. It was like I was completely lagged out. So I popped open the menu and clicked Exit Diablo 3. Nothing. Clicked it again. Nothing. End task.

Yes.

By the way, when you exit the game it gives you a count down like you would see in a MMO if you’re not in a safe spot. I have to wonder… WTF?! It makes no sense unless you’re PVPing… hello, if you’re the only person on the server (which seems to be the case even when you just want to play alone), you don’t need to do this come up.

Earlier in the day I was playing a Barbarian through and I didn’t have any lag issues. Instead I had disconnects from Battle.net which kicked me out of the game. Again, I was trying to play the game by myself and really didn’t want anything to do with the Battle.net stuff. This was somewhat frustrating as the adventure part of the world resets and you start outside the dungeon you just delved to the bottom of but didn’t pick up the quest item from… ugh.

Yes, there are some things they need to sort out and polish up around the Battle.net connectivity, but the game itself seemed pretty solid.